Bureaucratic Ambition: Careers, Motives, and the Innovative Administrator

1. Principles, Principals, and Ambition: The Politics of Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship

chapter one Principles, Principals, and Ambition The Politics of Bureaucratic Entrepreneurship Innovations are so heavily dependent on executive interests and beliefs as to make the appearance of a change-oriented personality enormously important in explaining change. It is not easy to build a useful social science theory out of ‘‘chance appearances.’’ james q. wilson, bureaucracy This book advances a theory of bureaucratic ambition, its e√ects on innovation in public agencies, and its impact on democratic governance in an era of professional public administration. The names of America’s most prominent, transformational public administrators are easily familiar to scholars of American politics or public administration . William Bratton, William Mulholland, Gi√ord Pinchot, Alice Rivlin, and James Lee Witt are icons of agency leadership who—for better or worse—defined their professions, transformed their agencies, and changed the broader political landscape. These administrators’ triumphs and tragedies are chronicled by the media, and scholars of the policy process have branded them policy entrepreneurs. Policy entrepreneurs have become a theoretical staple of public policy studies, and bureaucratic executives are among the political actors most often identified as policy entrepreneurs. Like their counterparts in the business world, policy entrepreneurs recognize latent demand for policy changes and then expend resources and take risks to drive innovation in government. Policy entrepreneurship is an evocative concept because it captures the role that individual leadership so clearly plays in policy innovation.∞ 2 Bureaucratic Ambition But for all the excellent accounts of bureaucratic politics and policy entrepreneurship that scholars have produced, the sources of bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship have been elusive: we know very little about where these entrepreneurial bureaucrats come from (Mintrom and Norman 2009). What makes some bureaucrats pursue innovations more than others do? Why are some bureaucrats more politically assertive than others? In case studies and anecdotal accounts, entrepreneurial bureaucrats seem to exhibit uncommon energy, resourcefulness, creativity, and toughness. But these exceptional qualities have limited bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship as a model of politics, as James Q. Wilson observed in his seminal Bureaucracy (1989). If entrepreneurial administrators have exceptional personalities, do they appear merely by chance, ex nihilo? Moreover, the implications of bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship for democratic governance have been unclear. Where do professional administrators’ loyalties lie? Who wins and loses when entrepreneurial administrators drive policy change? Consider the career of Robert C. White. As a precinct police commander in Washington, DC, White equipped o≈cers with confiscated bicycles when the city council was slow to fund a bike patrol that it had earlier approved. He created and was the first leader of the District of Columbia’s public housing police force. Later, as the chief of police in Greensboro, North Carolina, White attended a di√erent church each week to spread ‘‘a vision of a police force that was truly part of the community.’’≤ In Greensboro, Chief White also defused racial tensions over a police shooting of a nineteen-year-old black suspect. He advanced innovative reforms in community policing and persuaded Greensboro’s reluctant city council to spend $9 million on new police substations. In January 2003, White was hired by Louisville, Kentucky, to head a police department twice as large as Greensboro’s. A track record of innovation led to his move; Louisville’s mayor indicated that he hired White because he ‘‘has experience with a large urban police force, once created another police agency from scratch and, in his most recent job, dismantled . . . ‘a good ol’ boy’s organization’ and began appointing more women and minorities to top posts.’’ White’s new position was the latest in an ongoing path of career advancement that led him from one city to another. In this book, I argue that ambition and opportunity for career advancement in the professional labor market cause some administrators to pursue innovative policies according to the norms of their professions, just as Chief White did. Where opportunities for career advancement are only within single orga- Principles, Principals, and Ambition 3 nizations, administrators are less likely to innovate and more likely to follow elected o≈cials’ directives. Not all bureaucrats are alike, of course; Chief White may have been ambitious, but surely not all administrators are. Bureaucratic ambition is a matter of personality psychology, as well as of economic opportunity. Di√erent administrators have di√erent motives, and these differences a√ect bureaucrats’ willingness to assume risks and expend resources in pursuit of their professions’ preferred policies. Innovation...